


folie à deux

by windupgirl



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 15:02:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10993329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windupgirl/pseuds/windupgirl
Summary: Close enough to feel the heat of him Mad Sweeney feels like Icarus. Exhilarated, flying, falling. Shadow’s hands on him are fire and his skin burns in the wake of them and he’s never sure where the fighting stops and the fucking starts.





	folie à deux

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Безумие на двоих](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13323282) by [Vinsachi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vinsachi/pseuds/Vinsachi)



It’s not that Shadow Moon’s the most beautiful thing Mad Sweeney’s ever laid his greedy wanting eyes upon, but it surely is a close thing.  


There was a girl, he thinks, in long-ago Boston with a quick wit and a simmering smile, eyes like the storm-tossed sea and the reddest hair he’s ever seen—not like fire, not like his, but like wine or blood or that sacred sunset time before true dark, warm and deep and ever-changing like a thing alive. She was a rare and shining beauty, pretty as a picture, as poetry, but damned if he can recall her name.

There are others burning in his memory like beacons, a broad-shouldered boy with vitiligo across his face and his arms and his chest like the lines of some new continent, a girl with a golden smile and a laugh like music, the kind of beauty that stops the beating heart in your chest and knocks all the air from your lungs and makes you weak—but he’s never _wanted_ any of them like he wants Shadow Moon.

Shadow stokes in him a low and urgent fire, the electric smell of him like he’s walked through a storm, the way looking at him too long is like staring down the sun on a clear day. He doesn’t smile often but when he does it lights him up, a trembling incandescence brief and lovely and terrible as a lightning strike, charged with the same latent energy that galvanises him when he’s fighting, when he’s fucking.

Close enough to feel the heat of him Mad Sweeney feels like Icarus. Exhilarated, flying, falling. Shadow’s hands on him are fire and his skin burns in the wake of them and he’s never sure where the fighting stops and the fucking starts.

*

Tonight, it goes like this: they’re falling-down drunk in a grimy Super 8 twin room and Mad Sweeney’s thinking about his lucky coin, and he’s thinking about dear departed Laura Moon. Specifically, he’s thinking about his lucky coin burning in her bloodless palm, and he must look as sullen as he feels because Shadow slurs a noise that might be a laugh and says, “Jesus, who pissed in _your_ Lucky Charms?”

Sweeney swings without thinking, smacks his fist hard against Shadow’s jaw and relishes the pain that blooms red and exquisite in his bruised knuckles when he does it. He’s been spoiling for fisticuffs all evening.

“Fuck you, Shadow,” he says conversationally, watching with carefully affected indifference as Shadow licks blood from his split lip. There’s something dangerous and predatory in those dark eyes, something that _hungers_ , and Mad Sweeney feels a shiver pulse electric down his spine. There’s gooseflesh rising on his forearms, a tight coil of heat in his belly.

“Fuck _me_?” Shadow echoes, incredulous, and Sweeney smiles like a wolf—or perhaps he just bares his teeth.

“With pleasure,” he says, and cracks his neck, and swings again.

*

Later, breathing hard and drooling blood while Shadow holds him down and fucks him into the mattress, he moans like a whore and struggles against him and says with what scant conviction he can muster, “You’re such a cunt— _fuck_ —”

Shadow pulls his hair and sighs laughter against his back, burns a trail of biting kisses from his shoulder up his neck to his ear.

“Yeah?” he murmurs there, low and breathless. “Huh. From back here I could’ve sworn you were the cunt.”

Mad Sweeney moans a laugh. “You’re being facetious now.”

“I am.”

“You are. So shut your fucking mouth and fuck me like you mean it, yeah?”

*

Come morning all he’ll remember is that they fucked, and that it was good. Shadow will kiss him awake (“Your breath smells like a hot trashcan,”) and they’ll breakfast on cheap cigarettes and cheaper coffee; when the old man brings the Cadillac around they’ll fight over who gets shotgun and Mad Sweeney will lose—again.

“I’m paying you to drive, you know,” Wednesday will say reproachfully, but he’ll back the car out of the parking lot anyway, resigned to a morning at the wheel.

Stretched out catlike in the backseat Mad Sweeney will drowse between flashbulb fragments of the night before, every recollection dim and smoky and backlit by the sleazy red neon of the vacancy sign, the occasional white beam of headlights passing.

When they pull over in some nameless backroad town in Cook County, Wednesday will say a little irritably, “Meet me at the bar when you’re done,” and the two of them will pretend they don’t know what he means.

No sooner than they’ve lost sight of him Shadow will be on his knees sucking Sweeney off against the sun-warmed Cadillac’s cooling bonnet.

*

He doesn’t know why he’s following the All-Father’s infernal shitshow across America’s bloated and Godless carcass. He doesn’t know what he’s hoping for at the end. He doesn’t even know if he can see it through.

The only thing he knows with any certainty is that he’s never fallen moonstruck for anyone like he has for Shadow Moon.

Oh, _that_ he knows as sure as he knows the changing seasons, honeyed golden summer blazing into fall, the rush and the heady vitality of springtime so far off it’s barely a memory, the white spectre of winter cold so deep you can smell it.

In a rare moment of introspection, he supposes it might be worthwhile to just relax and enjoy the journey.

No use fretting about the fun ending when it’s barely getting started, after all.


End file.
